We conducted a search in Ovid MEDLINE, Web of Science (Core collection and Zoological Record), JSTOR, BioOne, African Journals Online, Global Health and the pre-print servers, BioRxiv and EcoEvoRxiv for the following terms as keywords, no date constraints were used:
We searched other resources including the UN Official Documents System, Open Grey, AGRIS FAO and Google Scholar using combinations of the above terms.
We ran the search on 2021-03-01.
We included studies if they met all of the following inclusion criteria; i) reported findings from trapping studies where the target was a small mammal, ii) described the type of trap used or the length of trapping activity or the location of the trapping activity, iii) included trapping activity from at least one West African country, iv) recorded the genus or species of trapped individuals, v) were published in a peer-reviewed journal or as a pre-print on a digital platform or as a report by a credible organisation.
We excluded studies if they met any of the following exclusion criteria: i) reported data that were duplicated from a previously included study, ii) no full text available, iii) not available in English.
One reviewer screened titles, abstracts and full texts against the inclusion and exclusion criteria. At each stage, a random subset (10%) was reviewed by a second reviewer.
Figure 1: Each row represents one of the 126 included studies, green points designate the first year of data collection, blue points designate the end of data collection. For studies completed within one year the blue point completely overlies the green. Studies with a transparent grey point did not report the year in which trapping was conducted. The year of publication is shown by a red point.
Figure 1 - Panel A - plot of studies, Panel B - location of traps, Panel C - The distribution of population density at trap sites, Panel D- The distribution of habitat types at trap sites compared to all habitat types in West Africa.
Figure 2: Panel A: Map of West Africa, countries where rodent trapping has occurred are mapped to level 2 administrative areas (where available). These regions are coloured by the total number of trap nights performed at trap sites within their boundaries. Panel B: (n.b. will not include map in final manuscript) The number of trap nights conducted is associated with a regions population density. The population density for all regions in West Africa is shown in the yellow box plot, the population density and trap night density for each region is show on the purple scatterplot. The line of best fit is a GAM model not incorporating spatial interactions. The map panel on the right is the product of the GAM model incorporating spatial interactions. Panel C: For each of the 10 land cover classes from the ESA dataset we measure the proportion of 300m2 pixels within a level 2 administrative area. Zoonotic trapping studies occurred in regions over-representative for Cropland, Mosaic landscapes and Shrubland while being under-representative for Bare and Sparse vegetation land cover classes.
Figure 3: Each row corresponds to a single rodent species. The column on the left shows the presence and absence of a rodent species from the individual studies included in this review. The centre column shows the presence of a rodent species obtained from GBIF (September 2021) for records where longitude and latitude have been provided. The right column shows the range of rodent species as proposed by the IUCN (2021) (red shaded area), overlaid are the presence points from both this review and GBIF records.
Figure 4 - Presence/absence plots for the following pathogens Arenaviruses with LASV highlighted, Bartonella, Borrelia and Toxoplasma.
Figure 5 - Matrix heat plot Y - rodent species/genera, X - pathogen species/genera. Colour relates to proportion positive (Perhaps use bivariate colour to also highlight the number of test performed in that species).